Posted on 04/09/2024 5:09:28 AM PDT by Carriage Hill
How vast was the Great COVID Cover-up? Well, my investigation has recently discovered government officials from 15 federal agencies knew in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was trying to create a coronavirus like COVID-19.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Is there a credible source for this? How about the full text of the email so that we can see the context?
The problem with fear-mongers is that they take a snippet and present it out of context to imply that the author of the snippet was saying something they never actually said.
In 2014, the government was very concerned about the possibility of a pandemic. In 2014, I was a member of the pandemic warning team which was tasked with making sure our laboratory network would be capable of identifying a new outbreak and communicating it to the CDC in a timely fashion. The fact that the government is highly concerned about pandemics does not imply that scientific research meant to reveal exactly what makes an organism pandemic capable can cause a pandemic. This is not something that the scientific community fully understands yet. We know the characteristics of a pandemic organism, but why one organism causes a pandemic while a similar organism only causes sporadic illness is not something we have figured out yet.
Every government on earth is concerned about pandemics for good reason. Pandemics and epidemics have killed countless hundreds of millions throughout history. As we saw during the height of the Covid pandemic before vaccines became available, a pandemic is a huge disruptor of economic activity and society. Governments would rather avoid such disruptions because they depend on the taxes generated by robust economic activity in order to function.
This was 100% obvious by a review of relevant journal articles, research contracts and forensics on the virus itself.
Do you have a list of references in the medical literature which show the experiments and data that show that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered?
Since my PhD is in biochemistry and molecular biology, I can assure you that any signs of genetic engineering of the virus are easy to find once one has the full sequence. The sequence of the original isolate of SARS-CoV-2 is available online in Genbank. You can plug that sequence into NCBI-Blast and do a search for what is called "vector contamination" in that sequence. There isn't any. (I did this already.) Other tell-tale signs of genetic engineering would be the presence of genes that are not associated with coronaviruses--there are none of those.
By the way, what I mean by "medical literature" is articles that are peer-reviewed, published in reputable journals, and indexed in PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). Any journal article that describes the evidence of bio-engineering of the virus absolutely must contain the relevant sequence data and analysis that led to the conclusion that this virus originated from something other than a natural source.
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I am a PhD educated biochemist/molecular biologist with experience in research of infectious organisms and countermeasures development.
Rand Paul is an ophthalmologist (eye doctor). Like most physicians, he is not trained in research theory or practice. I seriously doubt that he is capable of developing a PCR assay, extracting nucleic acid from viruses for analysis, growing virus in the lab, or any other of the hundreds of techniques that I had to learn in the process of earning my PhD. Yet Rand Paul keeps passing himself off as an expert in virology.
As a biochemist/molecular biologist who has never studied eye anatomy and function, I do not and will never claim to have expertise in the area of ophthalmology. The fact that I can legally call myself "Doctor" does not magically give me expertise in fields other than biochemistry and molecular biology.
Be wary of people who present themselves as experts in a subject they never studied. They'll often use their degree to fool people into believing they are experts when their degree has nothing to do with the subject matter.
Well, thank you for the complement!
I know that you mean it as an insult, but you just acknowledged (in a back-handed way) that I do, in fact, have a fair amount of expertise in this area.
Yes, I get it. Scientists who have the relevant education and do the research are just a bunch of liars, while charlatans who spout a bunch of hooey are the only ones you can trust.
If you were defending the charlatans who sell fake cancer cures as adamantly as you defend antivax propagandists, I actually wouldn't have much to say. I don't care if you want to put your life in the hands of a charlatan who claims to cure cancer because that only affects you. But misinformation about vaccines and infectious disease affects everyone. This is why I debunk such misinformation.
The papers I reviewed were peer reviewed from journal articles and a number were actually published by the Wuhan Institute itself.
I also reviewed a DARPA proposal submitted by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance detailing a proposal to develop bio engineered bat corona virus variant that is a pretty faithful description of the Covid -19 virus.
DARPA rejected the proposal and Daszak eventually did the work in Wuhan.
It appears that the virus was at least in part developed by the method of serial passage which would not leave the sort of markers that you describe via the analytic tools you have access to. FWIW, there seems to have been a serious cover up of the origins of the virus at the highest levels around the world, so I am generally not accepting at face value any foundational work done by any non military sources.
That includes the sequence of the "original isolate" of the SARS-CoV-2, if for no other reason that there were multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2 circulating at the outbreak of the Covid Pandemic and the relationship between the variants is pretty much what you expect from sequential iterations on a serial passage development program. This would suggest a lab release of an in process iteration of a serial passage development program
Have you done your own independent sequence of the Covid - 19 virus to verify the sequence of the "original isolate" is an accurate representation of the Covid - 19 virus ?
The people you are defending lied to us. I don’t care how educated they are, they are liars.
Also, I advise against using the term "the general consensus is..." when this is NOT the general consensus of the infectious disease research community. It is, rather, the claim of the "Paris group" which is a loosely associated group of non-ID experts who got together to push alternatives to the scientific view.
Furthermore, since you claim to have read papers that corroborate the claim of bioengineered viruses: where are the links to their citations in Pubmed? If they say what you claim they say, then certainly you have no objection to my reading them for myself.
As for the rejected Daszak proposal: since one of the skills I developed during my career as a researcher, then supervisory scientist is the ability to find medical/scientific information, I was able to track it down. And here's a link to it.
Project DEFUSE: Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses.
What the title alone tells me is that Daszak was very concerned about a spillover event occurring and recognized that bat coronaviruses had a high potential for being the source of such a spillover. The proposal itself is 75 pages long, so I am not going to give a page-by-page breakdown of what it says and the implications of the experiments proposed. Unfortunately, the PDF is not interactive and my attempt to copy/paste from it resulted in a very messy block of text, so I have to extensively clean it up. Let's take a look (at the cleaned version):
Section II - A. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Technical Approach: Our goal is to defuse the potential for spillover of novel bat-origin high-zoonotic risk SARS-related coronaviruses in Asia. In TA1 we will intensively sample bats at our field sites where we have identified high spillover risk SARSr-CoVs. We will sequence their spike proteins, reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays, and insert them into bat SARSr-CoV (WIV1, SHCO14) backbones (these use bat-SARSr-CoV backbones, not SARS-CoV, and are exempt from dual-use and gain of function concerns) to infect humanized mice and assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease. Our modeling team will use these data to build machine-learning genotype-phenotype models of viral evolution and spillover risk. We will uniquely validate these with serology from previously-collected human samples via LIPS assays that assess which spike proteins allow spillover into people. We will build host-pathogen spatial models to predict the bat species composition of caves across Southeast Asia, parameterized with full inventory of host-virus distribution at our field test sites, three caves in Yunnan Province, China, and a series of unique global datasets on bat host-viral relationships. By the end of Y1, we will create a prototype app for the warfighter that identifies the likelihood of bats harboring dangerous viral pathogens at any site across Asia.
What this all says in highly technical language is that they were planning to isolate spike proteins from existing bat coronaviruses in order to assess their ability to infect humans. And they were going to take what they learned and develop an algorithm for predicting which bat coronaviruses can potentially infect humans. The experiments described are of a type routinely performed in laboratories all over the world, and similar to experiments I myself performed in graduate school during my PhD research.
It appears that the virus was at least in part developed by the method of serial passage which would not leave the sort of markers that you describe via the analytic tools you have access to.
First of all, while serial passage does have an effect on the genome of the organism being passaged, the effect on pathogenicity is tangential. The passaged organism evolves to better infect its host. So, if the host is cells in culture, it will become better at infecting those cells. If the host is mice, it will become better at infecting mice. How that affects its pathogenicity in humans cannot be determined without actually testing it in humans. And passaging is not considered a bioengineering technique. In order to bioengineer, you need to use a variety of molecular biology tools (a comprehensive collection of them is available from NEW ENGLAND Biolabs but a number of biotech companies sell them). As I stated previously, the evidence of such bioengineering is evident to anyone who knows their way around bioinformatics and knows how to analyze and compare sequences.
I will add here that I have only seen one piece of "evidence" that was bandied around early on as "proof" that the virus was engineered in a lab. This is the fact that the virus contains a furin cleavage site--which the professional antivax charlatans claimed does not exist naturally in coronaviruses. However, as many debunkers (including myself) have pointed out, furin cleavage sites are present in many coronaviruses, including SARS, MERS, and viruses that cause the common cold. Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses. I suppose that since that particular piece of misinformation was so quickly and easily debunked, the propagandists have resorted to vague claims that anyone would realize that the virus was bioengineered, without providing any actual references or evidence.
so I am generally not accepting at face value any foundational work done by any non military sources.
FYI, this kind of work is done by scientists in public, private, and educational sectors who are located all over the world. As long as the publications describe solid techniques and reasonable analysis/interpretation of data, I'm not going to reject their conclusions based on their affiliation. Scientists at University of Tehran, USAMRIID, or the Brazilian Clinical Research Institute are equally qualified to do this kind of research.
I do find it interesting that you say you do not accept any work done by non-military sources, when the majority of conspiracy theory buffs absolutely reject anything to do with the government because of its role in collating and summarizing the findings of the wider scientific community. I assume that you are aware that DoD scientists work closely with scientists from other executive branch agencies.
It *is* rather amusing that one line of conspiracy misinformation focuses on trying to convince people that SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous bioengineered bioweapon, while another line of conspiracy misinformation claims that it is no more dangerous than its cold-causing cousins. These are mutually exclusive claims!
That includes the sequence of the "original isolate" of the SARS-CoV-2, if for no other reason that there were multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2 circulating at the outbreak of the Covid Pandemic and the relationship between the variants is pretty much what you expect from sequential iterations on a serial passage development program.
No, the fact that a virus changes over time is not indicative of any sort of "serial passage development program." It is simply indicative of the fact that viruses, especially RNA viruses, mutate readily over time. All the fact that there was more than one variant at the initial outbreak means is that there was more than one spillover event. And this is completely consistent with the fact that biosecurity at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (now closed) was non-existent.
Have you done your own independent sequence of the Covid - 19 virus to verify the sequence of the "original isolate" is an accurate representation of the Covid - 19 virus ?
I don't know about you, but I do not keep a full molecular biology lab in my house. And I'm not likely to set one up since even used equipment is expensive as are reagents and consumables. Plus, my spare bedroom is already full of sewing equipment and supplies so I have no room for a lab. So, no, I have not sequenced any virus myself (although I certainly have the skills to do so). Lucky for the scientific community, there is a database that contains all of the sequences: Download a SARS-CoV-2 genome data package. I'm perfectly capable of downloading the sequences and analyzing them through nucleotide BLAST, CLUSTAL, or any of the other bioinformatics programs that are, in fact, publicly accessible. But I don't really need to, since there are already groups doing just that, like this one, nextstrain.org, which produces interesting and informative graphics like this: Genomic epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 with subsampling focused globally over the past 6 months.
FYI, I am not "fighting a rear guard action." I am attempting to debunk misinformation and educate people so that they will not be so susceptible to falling for antivax/charlatan lies. This is because those lies kill people.
So, the entire infectious disease community consisting of thousands of experts representing multiple scientific disciplines all got together to develop a lie and they did it so well that they all tell a consistent story.
That's not very plausible, but whatever.
What *is* plausible is that a handful of malicious kooks coordinated to spread misinformation for the purpose of increasing the number of Covid deaths and making sure this virus becomes endemic and continues to kill people. Since these kooks have always existed, this is the explanation that I accept.
what’s plausible is florida governor ron desantis proving the kung flu is a scam and florida surgeon general dr. joseph lapado recommending people avoid getting the fauxcine...
I bet you have Peter Daszack and Anthony Fauci on your Christmas card list. It hurts to realize that “your people”, the vaccine and virus researchers, are complicit in deception and are responsible for the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands.
You own it. I’m through talking to you.
I do not know Peter Daszack, but I do know that Anthony Fauci has always commanded a great deal of respect from the infectious disease research community.
When you claim deception and so forth, what you are really saying is that the entire scientific community—tens of thousands of scientists all over the world—is conspiring to invent and spread lies instead of reporting the results of their research.
This belief begs the question of why you are so willing to believe the quacks and charlatans who either misrepresent the real scientific research or just plain make things up without doing any research whatsoever. How can they possibly know anything about Covid if they haven’t done research?
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